Q I have discovered the wonders of Knoppix while waiting for my new PC to arrive. The HD from my Linux PC is on /dev/hdb and all my data is there. I wanted to copy a few files from /mnt/hdb7 to /mnt/hda5 but I get a read only message. I have done su and checked the /etc/fstab and listed the permissions - it all looks fine. I have never worked with Knoppix before; I just booted it up as a novelty. Now that it is a truly useful tool I need to know how to make the most of it. I am sure that I am missing something obvious.
A The general philosophy of Knoppix is to allow users as little write access as possible. For this reason, existing partitions are either not mounted or only mounted as 'read only' click with your right mouse button an icon, the 'read only' attribute under item device' can be un-checked. After this, the partition can be mounted 'read write' (for already mounted partitions, first click on Unmount). CAUTION: writing to NTFS partitions can lead to data loss, since Linux does not really support this filesystem! However, DOS and FAT32 filesystems are safe for write access. In the shell, the command mount o remount,rw /mnt/ <partition name> can allow already-mounted file systems to be made writeable.